Thursday, December 21, 2017

It's official

The United States no longer has a conservative political party. In case there was any doubt, the Republican Party is a prostitute for Wall Street and the uber wealthy. We are actually going to borrow $1.5 trillion in order to subsidize billionaires and big business. This is like handing your Visa or MasterCard to Jeff Bezos and telling him to have fun with it.

Who is going to pick up the tab for all of this? Well we know who isn't.

My advice, live for the moment and enjoy. But you don't want to live too long because one day the bill for all of this high living is going to come due, just like your credit card tab. And when it does... things are going to get ugly.

The National Debt Clock
(Note this only counts the current debt outstanding. It does not include the tens of trillions in unfunded future liabilities, i.e. promises we have made without any clue where the money is coming from.)

5 comments:

My understanding is that just to stop future exponential increase requires at least a 43% real cut in spending yesterday, and an equivalent increase in taxes would grind the economy to a standstill before it could ever be paid and applied.

Nobody can stomach a 43% cut in anything now so I expect that to happen sometime between now and never, and what cannot continue will not.

This will not change by shuffling around the Ds and Rs in the government or posting memes. There have not been any conservatives in the government conserving anything worthwhile for a long time now.

Nixon took us off the gold standard for just this reason. The rest of the west went off the gold standard so that they could fight WWI. Had they remained, that war would have been quite short. Kind of a pity, isn't it, that we can feel the loss of gold much more quickly than the loss of life.

The Republicans are just returning to their post-TR, pro-big business roots. It's conservatism was simply the way to win over Dixiecrats after the Dems passed the Voting Rights Act, and to pander to Evangelicals looking to use govt to push religious values on a country Christians were already losing on the merits.

"Merits" are relative, not that I think Protestant evangelicalism is meritorious.

The notions that future taxpayers can pay for policies we can't afford out of our own pockets, and that somebody else is always to blame for poor life outcomes are always considered meritorious in a secular democracy, for example.

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